The President Holds the key, as one Before him did

“Healing will not come from the police, the gazette or the courts. It comes from State House. President Hichilema has walked out of this exact situation once before. He is the only person in Zambia who knows what it costs from the inside, and the only one who can end it from…

“Healing will not come from the police, the gazette or the courts. It comes from State House. President Hichilema has walked out of this exact situation once before. He is the only person in Zambia who knows what it costs from the inside, and the only one who can end it from the outside”

Six Zambians lost their passports on Friday. The gazette gave the same reason for all of them, national security, and nothing else. No conduct named, no provision of the law cited, no chance to answer first.

They are Emmanuel Mwamba, a former ambassador; Dr Sishuwa Sishuwa, a historian; Binwell Mpundu and Emmanuel Jay Banda, former Members of Parliament; Kaizer Zulu, a former State House aide; and Lillian Mutambo, a blogger. A passport is not only for travel. It is how a person proves who they are at a bank, at a border, at any counter that matters, which is why Amnesty International says taking it leaves someone effectively stateless. What the six share is not a conviction. It is a habit of criticising the Government.

That same day, Brian Mundubile and Makebi Zulu were charged with sedition at Kabwe. Their lawyer Sakwiba Sikota explained the charge. Mundubile posted a video saying his party had won on its own count and asked the Electoral Commission of Zambia to release the results. Zulu called him president. For that, a seven-year maximum.

Every losing candidate believes for a fortnight that he was robbed. Mature democracies answer with figures, not with a charge sheet.

Why a second charge

Both men were already in Mukobeko on treason, which is non-bailable and tried only in the High Court. They could not be held more tightly. Sedition changes nothing about their detention today. It changes what happens tomorrow.

Treason is the hardest charge in our law to prove. It needs an overt act, a conspiracy, evidence that survives cross-examination. Sedition needs a video, and the video exists.

So this column will say plainly what many Zambians have already worked out. The State does not expect the treason case to stand. The second charge is there so the first does not have to. Whichever way the evidence falls, the two men who came closest to power in August stay out of public life for years, and 2031 arrives without them.

Acting Attorney-General Marshal Muchende rejects that framing. “Zambia has no prisoners of conscience or political prisoners,” he said, answering UN Special Rapporteur Gina Romero, who called the charges concocted. He argues the accused face treason and terrorism offences over alleged sponsorship of unlawful paramilitary training, that the Constitution grants no immunity on grounds of political status, and that Government treats the arrests as matters of national security.

Every one of those propositions is sound. Not one answers the question the public is asking, which is when the evidence will be tested. Two weeks on, neither matter has a court date.

A death, and three accounts of it

Former Cabinet Minister Mutotwe Kafwaya was shot during the Kabulonga operation. Government first rejected reports that he had been shot at all, Defence Permanent Secretary Maambo Haamaundu saying hospital checks showed no record of him at Maina Soko. His family had no official word for five days. His wife Dinis Ng’andu Kafwaya went to the High Court for habeas corpus to force the authorities to produce him.

On 19 August, Inspector General Graphel Musamba confirmed Kafwaya was the unidentified man fatally wounded in an exchange of gunfire, police saying a Joint Task Force came under fire and returned it. Mundubile says he was present and that Kafwaya was shot inside his bedroom beside him.

The Law Association of Zambia said it was gravely concerned and called for an independent probe, pointing to inconsistencies between what emerged later and earlier statements by three permanent secretaries. A complaint has since gone to The Hague seeking an investigation into the chain of command behind the use of lethal force. Chief Mpepo asked something simpler: show the nation the weapons, as has always been the practice when such a find is made.

A man is dead, three senior officials gave accounts that do not sit together, and a widow had to sue to learn where her husband was. A month has passed without an explanation.

The count, honestly stated

Hichilema was declared winner with 60.49 per cent against Mundubile’s 37.87, a gap of more than a million ballots. Trouble in a handful of constituencies does not close a margin that size and nobody should pretend it does.

But a vote must also deliver a process the loser can see was clean, and process failures poison confidence whether or not they change a result.

On 14 August the ECZ suspended counting nationwide, saying staff were being attacked and ballot papers stolen in some instances, without saying by whom. Halting an entire national count was never properly explained.

In Mandevu, Chief Electoral Officer Brown Kasaro confirmed that unknown individuals attacked the totalling centre, destroyed the transmission kits and fled with all documentation, leaving the returning officer unable to declare the result. A fresh election was ordered. Videos afterwards appeared to show ballots in drainages and others burnt, and police recovered a stolen ECZ laptop.

The former ambassador among the six goes further, alleging that UPND cadres led by a man he names as Kalufyanya attacked polling stations in Chaisa, Lilanda and Chawama and destroyed thousands of votes, with similar scenes at Bwacha North in Kabwe. Those are his allegations. Nobody has been charged and the man he names has not answered them, which is why they need investigating rather than leaving to circulate. Citizens First’s Steven Mwale made a related point, that the commission should have pursued those responsible instead of making a whole constituency vote again.

Note the sequence. A man alleges ballot destruction, names names, calls for a fresh national poll. Weeks later his passport is cancelled on grounds nobody will explain. Those events may be unconnected. Government has said nothing to establish that they are.

Observers did not find the election unfree, and the record should be given whole. One regional mission led by former Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi found the process transparent, fair, legal and peaceful on the whole. Others found it free and transparent but not fair, citing misuse of state resources and restrictions on opposition campaigning. Reuters reported that two independent observer reports flagged indications the winning count may have been inflated. Hichilema denies any fraud.

None of that settles much. Missions watch polling stations for a day. They do not audit a count or follow the chain of custody of a ballot box, and they are guests of the state they assess. Their word is useful, never final. Nor is a telegram: the congratulations from UN Secretary-General António Guterres are a courtesy extended to every re-elected head of state on earth, and treating that as an audit is a generosity nobody in State House would extend to a critic.

The courthouse door

There is one proper place to settle all of this. Article 105 gives a losing candidate seven days from the declaration to petition the Constitutional Court. Hichilema was declared on 18 August. The window ran to the 24th.

On 24 August the courts were closed.

The High Court in Lusaka was sealed, and the Supreme Court building that houses the Constitutional Court, and several local courts, and High Court premises in Ndola, Chipata and Livingstone. In Chipata armed officers let nobody in. A memorandum from the judiciary’s chief administrator, seen by Human Rights Watch and Reuters, told staff not to report “for security reasons” and promised guidance once the situation was contained. Police called it an intelligence-led preventive measure and said no more.

Human Rights Watch said the closure came without credible explanation and blocked any challenge to the result. LAZ recorded concern at heavily armed military personnel around court premises. One lawyer told the BBC that three armed men stopped his vehicle and ordered him from the area.

No petition was lodged across a counter, because the counters were shut. An attempt was made to transmit one electronically, and whether that counts as a valid filing is now itself before the Constitutional Court. The inauguration went ahead on 1 September.

State House denies the President ordered the closure and points out that the judiciary is independent. That denial should be taken seriously, because there is no evidence he ordered it. It also sharpens the question rather than answering it. If the judiciary is independent, then an independent judiciary shut its own doors on the single day in five years when they were required to be open, and has still not said why.

Professor Cephas Lumina argues the arithmetic was wrong anyway, that seven days from 18 August runs to the 25th, and points to the Constitutional Court Rules of 2026, which require the Registry to open for an election petition from half past eight until six, including on days the courts are otherwise shut. Those rules exist so that this cannot happen.

The judge who advised

Then came the part that should trouble every lawyer in this country.

Former Constitutional Court judge Anne Mwewa Sitali was taken from her home at night, held at Richard Kachingwe Police Post and accused of conspiring to commit a felony. The alleged felony was the legal advice she gave to lawyers preparing the petition. She applied for habeas corpus and has since been granted bail.

Read that slowly. A former judge of the Constitutional Court was arrested over advice about how to approach the Constitutional Court. If that stands, no lawyer here can safely advise on a presidential petition again, and Article 105 becomes a right nobody will help you exercise. A right you cannot get advice about is not a right. It is an ornament.

Her history with that bench gives it an edge no columnist could invent. In 2016 she was one of three judges who dismissed Hichilema’s own presidential petition on the ground that time to hear it had lapsed. In October 2024 he removed her from the court along with the other two in that majority, Mungeni Mulenga and Palan Mulonda. In September 2026 she was arrested for helping someone else petition against him.

Three events across ten years, and this column does not claim one hand joined them. It records that they happened, in that order, to that woman.

She is not alone. Opposition sources and rights monitors put the number arrested since 13 August above three hundred, a figure Government has not confirmed and has not answered with one of its own.

A man may be wrong about an election. Thousands may think he is wrong. He is still entitled to be wrong in a courtroom, on the record, with the figures before a judge, advised by a lawyer who is not afraid of the cells. Close that door and you do not silence the allegation. You guarantee it outlives you.

Zambia has done this better

In April 2017 an opposition leader was arrested for treason after his convoy failed to give way to the presidential motorcade. He spent four months inside and his case was never heard.

Catholic bishops led by Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu pushed for talks. When that stalled, Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland came to Lusaka, met both men and secured a commitment to dialogue. It began with the opposition leader walking out of prison. Days later the State dropped the case.

The man released was Hakainde Hichilema. The President who released him was Edgar Lungu, under no obligation to do it. Nine years later Hichilema decorated Scotland and called that charge politically motivated. He was right, and he knows better than any man alive what a treason count is worth when the State has no intention of trying it.

The cases are not identical and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. A motorcade on a rural road is not a raid where weapons are alleged and a man died. The 2026 allegations are far graver and, if proved, deserve the full weight of the law. That is the point. Neither was ever tried, and an untried charge proves nothing, grave or trivial.

Healing is his to give

None of this establishes that the count was falsified, and this column does not claim it. It establishes that serious questions were raised, that the commission confirmed ballots were stolen, that the courts shut on the day those questions could have been filed, that the judge who advised on the filing was arrested, and that Government has answered with prosecutions instead of evidence.

Confidence is not built by a count alone. It is built by what a government does in the weeks after. Ours has cancelled passports without reasons, charged speech as sedition, left eighteen people in a maximum security prison with no trial date, and let the one constitutional avenue for challenging a result close without explanation.

In 2017 a president opened a prison door and dropped a case he could have pursued. He gained nothing by it. The country calmed, and the man he released went on to lead it. That door is now on the other side of the corridor.

The charges can be tested in open court or discontinued in the public interest, and either is lawful and honourable. The Kafwaya shooting can be independently investigated, the inconsistent statements explained and the weapons shown. The court closure can be explained by whoever ordered it. The case against Justice Sitali can be dropped. The figures can be published constituency by constituency.

What cannot hold is silence.

Healing will not come from the police, the gazette or the courts. It comes from State House. President Hichilema has walked out of this exact situation once before. He is the only person in Zambia who knows what it costs from the inside, and the only one who can end it from the outside

By Clement Haanzunga